Shadows and memories in 'Glass Menagerie' on Broadway

NEW YORK — We humans are strange creatures, forever craving reinvention and yet unable to prevent our pasts from dancing around in our heads. No poet or playwright ever understood that better than Tennessee Williams, a writer who traded one life he hated for another that he had forged for himself, only to find the shadows of what he'd left behind still raging and roaring in his skull. And in no play did Williams reveal himself more fully than in "The Glass Menagerie," a fragile, simple, beautiful creation of the 1940s that has finally come into its own in a new century, finally freed for good from its long, weary fight against the strictures of realism and the imperative of earnest optimism.

As you can see both in director John Tiffany's beautiful Broadway revival that opened here Thursday night and in a smaller but equally insightful and yet more intense Chicago revival that was the highlight of last season, directors have finally realized that there is no shame in presenting explicit memory in the only medium that can fully serve it, and that Amanda, Laura and her Gentleman Caller are really all shadows in the mind of Tom, the authorial alter ego who narrates this drama of remembrances, this shadowy play of mistakes made and traps sprung for life.

Writing long ago, the Chicago Tribune critic Claudia Cassidy called Williams "an Orpheus who looked back." And toward the end of Tiffany's production, the wisdom of that exquisitely simple summation is laid bare. Steven Hoggett, Tiffany's frequent collaborator, has dreamed up a movement vocabulary that puts you wholly in mind of your dreams of lost loved ones, who can seem at once so real and so far away. Hoggett's work invades the dividing line between the living and the dead, which is exactly what a play of memories demands.

Bob Crowley's set, fused with Natasha Katz's lighting, has many tricks up its sleeve. The intense surprises include an opening device that allows Celia Keenan-Bolger's Laura to be pulled into existence by her despairing brother, and a series of fire escapes that seem to reach all the way to the sky. But the most telling visual in this beautiful, sad collage involves a great, dark pool of water that slowly comes into focus, suggesting that all these characters actually are lost in the underworld, even if it's really just the recesses of the playwright's mind.

Cherry Jones, one of the great American stage actors, understands that playing a character in a memory play does not mean work informed by the ephemeral. Her Amanda is a great, gutsy woman from a time lousy for her gender. In this fine performance, you discern that her attempts at survival and modest progress are laid low by her own awareness of life's fragility for women, such as her daughter, without visible means of support. Keenan-Bolger spends much of the two hours of stage traffic trying to find some small victories to overcome her own despair; it is another beautiful performance.

Tiffany uses the Gentleman Caller, played by Brian J. Smith, to suggest that some of us are less consumed by painful memories than others, and that does not flow just from circumstance but from some kind of enviable immunity of the soul. In director Hans Fleischmann's Chicago production, actor Walter Biggs played Jim as a young man just as sad as Laura, a very valid interpretation. But Smith, whose work here pops through the force of contrast and pitch-perfect Midwestern will, makes him just one of those infuriating people we meet who don't seem to have any sadness in their heart and who just skate through life, inexplicably content. We sadder types often want to hitch our wagon to their engines, but, as Williams knew so well, it rarely works out well. And they often are taken before we can get to them.

The central poet in Tiffany's production is actor Zachary Quinto, who plays Tom. In places, Quinto's laconic style threatens the requisite high stakes of these memories. Why else is Tom telling us this story if it is not constantly pushing itself to the front of his head? Quinto will have to guard against the dangers of sitting atop a hit show, finding it easier every night when, for the guy he's playing, it should actually get harder with every telling. But Quinto has some extraordinary moments, not the least of which is a scene in which he drops his door key, watching it fall down, down, down into a void so deep that you never doubt for a moment that it will never unlock anything for him again. Just as well, perhaps.